To walking out of the house alone
To killing enemies with every dying emotion
To those who stand still in soulfading light
To those who don’t hesitate taking a bullet with pride
We salute you because you're willing to fight!

To face every plight without getting afraid
To bathe sometimes in the rain of grenades
To those with their eternal will
To those with the restless spirit
We salute you because you refuse to quit!

To the sacrifices that seemed very normal
To the courage amidst the literal horror
To those who dare to fight their own fears
To those who die fighting for us at the border
We salute you because YOU all are the real avengers!

And all those mothers who shed tears at night
All the wives keep waiting in the fading sight
All the families who lost their beloved ones
To those all who only lived once but shall stay forever
In our hearts, in our memories
In the history, for their dauntless bravery
To the real superheroes of our nation who don’t fight for any fame
I salute you because it's not a shame!

Hues of gold hug the horizon,
The air is heavy with the scent of a rainy day,
A pride of lions moves its limbs with a motion of might,
A motion of magic precedes the pack.

A dragonfly bounces along the river of relief,
The sun sets its final shimmer of sophistication
Behind the silhouette of a striking baobab.

A pocket of air holds the wings of the stork in a mathematical manner,
as it sweeps over of the plateau of promise.

South Africa,
A nation in progress,
Where each combination of skin tones each have a story to tell of its own,
a story of history,
a story of might.

Long live the pride of lions,
the Giants of our Rainbow Nation who sow seeds of sunshine in every corner of the soil.
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.

It’s 2018 August 12th

Night is falling,
the photographs in my hands radiant with the light of the past
where hills touch the sky,
not my parents‘ earth, only the ground they built on.
Their voices tender with longing for the motherland,
while there is merely my own
heart I see in the vast desert,
homeless, homesick,
waiting for moss to grow over that earth too.
Finally silence
where once was the noise of the nation,
we are children again,
alone in the motion of the Prague-Berlin train.